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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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It is a
mistake, I believe, to start a discussion on
Christianity and culture from the prevailing premise that ours is a secular or
secularizing society. Nor is talk about post-Christian culture terribly
helpful. The reality is considerably more interesting than that. For a long
time it has been assumed among western intellectuals that there is a necessary
linkage between modernity and secularization;
the more modern a society becomes,
the more secular it will be. It is now apparent that that assumption has
everything going for it except the empirical evidence. (The empirical evidence
and diverse analyses of it are brought together in Unsecular America, Eerdmans, 1986).

By all the measures available to
the social sciences, Americans are more religious
today than they were fifty years ago and—although the data get sketchier the
further back we go—probably than they were a century ago. At least in America, the story of modernity is not
turning out according to the script of the secular Enlightenment, in which it was proposed that religion would
progressively wither away or retreat to the most narrowly privatized sphere of
reality.

This has come as something of a
shock to our cultural elites who,
as has been amply demonstrated, are
considerably more secular than the general population. Comparative studies of
secularity and religiousness indicate that the United States ranks with India in terms of the pervasiveness and vibrancy of religion. My colleague Peter Berger has
aptly remarked that, religiously speaking, America is a society of Indians ruled by a
cultural elite of Swedes.

Conflicting attitudes toward
religion and understandings of religion’s
role in American society have everything to do with the development of “new class”
theory in recent years. The new class,
all too briefly, is that growing part of the old
middle class that trades in symbolic knowledge. In academe, media,
advertising, and elsewhere, their business is to mint and market the ideas by
which they think people should live. They are more or less uncritical
modernizers and, not surprisingly, many of them are to be found among the managers
of mainline (now old-line) churches. The denizens of the new class are for the
most part the “secular humanists” who so infuriate the religious right.

America is presently embroiled in a civil war, a Kulturkampf over conflicting definitions of the
American experiment and, very centrally, the role of religion and religiously-based
morality in that experiment. The forces associated with the religious right, on the one side, and those represented by People for the American Way, on the other,
are joined in the most visible, but not
necessarily the most important, battle
in this Kulturkampf. What I have elsewhere termed “the naked public square” is now being challenged by those who would fill
public space with moral discourse,
including moral discourse that is unabashedly religious in origin, motive,
and purpose. These forces are challenging,
among other things, a relatively recent
interpretation of the Constitution by which religion is no longer privileged
but penalized, and is effectively excluded from
public deliberation and decision making.

The popular, and sometimes populist, resurgence of religion in our public life is by
no means unqualifiedly good news. Much of it is not accompanied by moral
reflection that is sympathetic to the tradition of liberal democracy. In
addition, the cultural movement away from
a confining secularism has opened the gates to sundry irrationalisms, such as those found in the myriad streams of New
Age Consciousness.

So the remedy of the naked public
square is not simply more religion in public. The religion needed in the public
square is religion that can help in advancing a morally-informed public philosophy
for the free society. For reasons that range from Providence to demographic accident, such a religious contribution must be sought in
the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, I am convinced it is both meaningful and
imperative to speak of a Judeo-Christian tradition.) Especially critical is
religion that provides a theological legitimacy for the role of moral reason in
the ordering of public life. Jewish understandings of covenanted moral order, Roman Catholic thinking about natural law, Calvinist ideas regarding spheres of sovereignty, and Lutheran views of the two-fold rule of God
can all contribute powerfully to reconstituting culture and the civil realm as
arenas of moral deliberation and decision.

I do not know whether such a
cultural reconstruction is possible. I am convinced that it cannot happen
without the public reengagement of religion as sketched above. At the same time, we must be clear that the first task of the
Church is not culture-formation, not even
when the goal of that task is something so worthy as liberal democracy. The
first task of the Church is to be the Church. Only as Christians have
internalized their own communal understanding of their distinctive way of
being-in-the-world will they make a real contribution to the world. The crisis
in all our churches today is created not by the problems of the Church in the
world but by the problems of the world in the Church.

The Lutheran understanding of the
radical Gospel that constitutes the Church as Church can make a big difference
in helping the entire Church to make a difference in the world. The conception
of the two-fold rule of God nurtures both critical distance from and morally
serious engagement in the ordering of the polis. But of course this
understanding is not and never has been exclusively Lutheran. A crucial part of
that understanding is well articulated in the second (maybe third) century Epistle
to Diognetus: “Though Christians are resident at
home in their own countries, their
behavior there is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were
aliens. For them, any foreign country is a
homeland, and any homeland a foreign
country.”

In this postmodern period we need
to recapture the sense of distance and engagement in being alien citizens. Only
in this way is it believable that there will be a promising successor regime to
the now dying regime of modernity and secularization. Of course we have no word
from God that there will be such a successor regime, short of the promised Kingdom of God. For alien citizens that prospect is no reason for despair. Mr. Eliot had it right: “For us,
there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”